https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/03/07/lds-church-discloses/

Quite diversified, but nothing too surprising
41 pages of holdings


From the article:


The investment fund, called Ensign Peak Advisors, quietly submitted the filing Feb. 14 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The stock portfolio appears to represent a large portion of the total value of Ensign Peak, which whistleblowing brothers Lars and David Nielsen said in a complaint sent to the IRS controls assets worth at least $100 billion.

The SEC filing is standard for “institutional investment managers” with assets of at least $100 million.

Ensign Peak Advisors has met that threshold for years, yet the SEC website shows this is the first time the fund has submitted such a filing.

The portfolio was, I believe, released by the whistleblower. Once the information is public, there's not much reason to keep it secret--so what downside is there now to obeying the law?

cynical, yes. But I bet that's the thinking.

I don't think the actual portfolio was released by the whistleblower. I didn't see it published anywhere until today, or even summarized.

I wonder if it hurt them to see three or four billion evaporate two weeks ago?

A quick perusal of the youtube material suggests you are right. I think I recall having seen more information in a larger youtube presentation, but in this short one at 10:45 and 106.20 we are given the general distribution of equities (and bonds, and hybrids, and PE, etc) without the specific stock names.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDlFZF3RyhE



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2020 08:17PM by Lot's Wife.

LOL. "Oh, you mean that law applies to us? Our bad." :(

The rationale is that if someone has a big enough pot of money, they can do nefarious things like corner markets and manipulate prices. The SEC would like evidence that they are playing well with others.

I wonder if they will now move their money out of stocks and into something more opaque that doesn't need to be reported. I'm sure they hate having to let the world know what they are doing with their money, and how much they have.

$100 billion--or $60 billion in equities IIRC--isn't that easy to redeploy. Sure, bond markets are large enough but the rate of return there is relatively low. So keeping returns at 7-10% would require increasing investments in VC and private equity, and those markets aren't that large. Moreover that redeployment would look pretty bad in PR terms: I'm not sure the church wants to look like Bain Capital.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

I don't think this is really something the LDS corporation wants its members to know, though. The members think that the corporation's holdings are largely real estate, such as church buildings and farms and ranches. I think they would find this list a little disturbing.

It's sad how the members donate so much to the corporation, but they have so much less control over it than if they were stockholders or members of a credit union cooperative. They literally have no real vote. Even if they stand up in General Conference to vote when asked, they are ignored or escorted out.

The LDS corporation needs its tax exempt status removed. It's really just a charity for rich old guys for them and their families to get paid large salaries.